Lee Sung-min

Ten years of theater without getting paid a won

By the time recognition arrived for Lee Sung-min, his hair was already gray and his back was weathered from years on provincial stages. Born in 1968 in the small town of Bonghwa, he began his career in local theater in Daegu in the mid-1980s. For more than a decade he worked in experimental productions while his family lived in extreme poverty.

But the money didn't come.

In 2002 he decided to move to Seoul to try to break into the capital's commercial scene. He had no connections and no youthful leading-man look. His strategy was to accept tiny supporting roles in TV series and low-budget films where he barely appeared on screen for a few seconds. During that stage of his life he worked on more than fifteen productions a year just to pay the rent.

South Korean industry began to notice his ability to disappear into mediocre or authoritarian characters. In 2012, he landed a more substantial role in the medical drama Golden Time. There, he played a trauma surgeon with a difficult temperament that contrasted with the ethics of his castmates. It was his first serious signal to the South Korean market.

The boss every Korean wanted to have

The real leap in scale came in 2014 with the release of Misaeng: Incomplete Life. Lee Sung-min took on the role of Oh Sang-shik, a section chief at a multinational company who becomes the mentor of the lead character. The series was a sociological phenomenon in South Korea, and his portrayal of the exhausted office worker earned him the Best Actor award at the 2015 Baeksang Arts Awards.

Then television came along.

That success allowed him to stop being the eternal supporting player and lead major film projects. In 2018, he starred in The Spy Gone North, a espionage thriller based on real events in which he played a senior North Korean government official. His work in this film was so precise that he won the triple crown for Best Actor at the country's most important awards: the Grand Bell, Blue Dragon and Baeksang.

Because his style isn't built on hamminess. Lee Sung-min works through restraint and the use of silence. On the set of The Man Standing Next in 2020, he brought President Park Chung-hee to life using hearing aids and minimal gestures that recalled the dictator's historical recordings.

The tyranny of the patriarch on the small screen

In 2022, his career saw a new surge in popularity thanks to the series Reborn Rich. He played Jin Yang-chul, the relentless founder of a business conglomerate inspired by the Samsung family. Even though the lead was a young star, Lee Sung-min stole every scene with an imposing physical presence and a regional accent that he insisted on keeping to make the character feel authentic.

It was his ticket to top-tier movies.

In 2023, he took part in the film 12.12: The Day, a historical drama about the military coup of 1979 in Seoul. The production became one of the biggest box office hits in South Korean history, surpassing thirteen million viewers. In this film, he played the Army Chief of Staff who is arrested by rebels in one of the film's tensest sequences.

In 2024, he starred in the horror comedy Handsome Guys, where he radically departed from his usual style to play a rough-looking carpenter. The film earned more than eleven million dollars in its first month in commercial theaters. The international distribution deal for this film was closed in more than ten countries before its official premiere at the Sitges festival.